Dear readers, we need to talk.
Robbery. There isn’t a more overused work in boxing, maybe in all of sport. It is understandable though. Everyone reading this follows and loves a sport that uses a scoring system open to corruption and incompetence. Boxing delivers on those two promises frequently too. Robberies happen. One of the worst I can attribute to corruption would be the classic example of British contender Robin Reid’s misfortunes in Germany against unified titleholder Sven Ottke back in 2003. That was a fight refereed and judged on a level so farcical that it would have played as a straight comedy in a theater. Only real life has real stakes and Reid never received the big paydays that would have come his way with two belts. Instead it goes down as a tragedy. Incompetence is harder to pin down sometimes, but there is little reason to think Hassan N’Dam being rewarded a secondary title win over Ryota Murata despite clearly losing the fight and being on the road in Japan would have been financially beneficial to anyone. If there is no motive to be discerned, the random poor result can only be attributed to incompetence.
These are extreme examples, especially in the case of Ottke-Reid. Yet, less extreme examples cause the word to be tossed around all the time. Saturday night’s much anticipated middleweight rematch between Gennady Golovkin and Canelo Alvarez does not qualify. In fact, their first fight does not qualify either despite most people having scored it for GGG. Nor does a fight like Andre Ward’s first fight against Sergey Kovalev register as a robbery. Neither was a fight like Manny Pacquiao versus Jeff Horn.
In order for the word robbery to mean something, it can only be used sparingly. Only the most extreme cases should have the word applied to them. If we agree to this, the question then becomes how to discern what is and isn’t a robbery. I am going to go ahead and put forth the following definition to work with going forward:
In the sport of boxing, a robbery is a decision scored in favor of a fighter that no judge could have possibly rendered a reasonable decision for even if he or she were actively trying to score it for that winner.
It’s the last part that is important. Let’s look at it through the lens of Saturday night’s for some reason controversial rematch. Even if you ended up with a scorecard for Gennady Golovkin, could you go back and score the fight in Canelo’s favor by giving him the rounds he did well in but you thought GGG barely edged? If you scored it a draw or for Canelo, wouldn’t it be easy to shade it the other way by swapping a razor thin round or two? Certainly it could be done. The fight was as close as it gets. If you didn’t end up viewing several rounds as ones in which hairs had to be split to determine a winner, then you’re not needed here anymore anyway. Go watch a non-subjectively scored sport.
That is the truth about boxing. Scoring is subjective. We put forth a set of criteria for judges to follow, but ultimately the result will always only be in the eye of the beholder. Some viewers will have a natural bias towards come forward aggressors. Others will not be able but to help score blood on a gut level. Many judges may prefer the flashier single shots of a pure boxer. There are infinite ways to look at each individual fight. Ultimately a judge is responsible for scoring the most damage done in simplistic terms, but how does one compare shots that cannot be felt? By judging them as a matter of opinion, subjectively.
The old the standard scoring criteria has slowly been on its way out for some time. When is the last time you heard Harold Lederman go on about ring generalship, for example? Those nebulous terms like “effective aggression” were never well defined nor particularly helpful. Boxing is about hitting and not getting hit, but it isn’t about counting punches. Instead scoring is an attempt to quantify damage and this can never be an exact science. What do we do with the fighter who easily controlled a 2:55 seconds of a round but then was badly rocked at the bell? Who wins that? Do we value the longer display of boxing skill more, or the brief millisecond of serious damage? These are the subjective choices boxing judges are routinely faced with, never mind the extremely narrow rounds with little to separate the fighters like what frequently took place three minutes at a time on Saturday night.
One option with the latter type of round is to use the even, 10-10 scoring. There is nothing explicitly wrong with doing so, but all judges rightfully exercise caution in giving them out. There is almost always something to choose from in even the closest rounds. Not doing so brings to question why someone is judging a fight in the first place. 10-10 rounds can be fairly assigned, but they can also be lazily abused by the non-committal. Use them sparingly.
We’re getting the crux of the argument here. What also needs to be understood is that what was used to separate a close round on one card may not be the same as on another without anything being wrong with the decision. If a round was paper thin as many were Saturday night, it is completely reasonable that one viewer may have preferred Canelo’s body work in it while another scored the round for Golovkin thanks to his higher workrate. Two people judging can watch the same round and score it for the opposite man with both views being perfectly defensible. This is what seems to be so difficult for so many boxing fans to accept. Not all rounds end up with a black or white, right or wrong way to score them. They end up gray. A round could be scored one way each and 10-10 on the third scorecard without there being any issue to it.
There is no ball to watch go through a hoop for three points, no man to watch cross a goal line for six. Scoring doesn’t work like the other popular sports in the US and it never will. Yet, that doesn’t mean nothing can ever be clear. Some rounds are plain as day. For instance, go ahead and present an argument that Canelo Alvarez won the eleventh round in the rematch. Give it a shot. You’ll be fumbling over your words pretty quickly. That was as one sided of a three minute stretch as there was in that fight. It was a clear round in a fight where about half of them were not particularly clear at all. Even if you were tasked with scoring as many rounds as you could reasonably find for the Mexican superstar, you’re not going to end up scoring the eleventh round for him. It isn’t possible without ignoring or not understanding reality.
What we need to start doing is coming up with what I am going to tentatively name as the Acceptable Scoring Range, or ASR for short going forward. When scoring a fight as a fan, do at is a normal and come up with your score in the end. A note needs to be ascribed to each round though as long as it wasn’t a draw. For the most part, a simple “C” for close or a “W” for wide affixed next to the 10-9 or 9-10 would be fine. In rarer cases, a “D” could be added to note that a 10-9 round was particularly dominant. This would be used to account for the possibility that others might have scored the round 10-8 even though you didn’t.
If at the end of the fight you have ended up with hypothetically four wide Golovkin rounds and four wide Canelo rounds with four scored for one of them but marked close, then you can establish the ASR for the fight. As we’ve discussed, reasonable arguments can generally be put forth for both men in close rounds. To calculate the Acceptable Scoring Range, we simply then score all the close rounds for one fighter on one card and then do it again for the other fighter on another. In this case, four wide rounds in each man’s favor and four close rounds results in an ASR of 116-112 for Golovkin to 116-112 for Canelo. Please not that those numbers are hypothetical and not an actual indication of how I saw that fight going. I’m speaking in general terms and using those names because they are fresh.
As we dive deeper into this, we also have to make peace with the fundamental nature of the 10 point must system. All rounds are scored equally as long as a point isn’t deducted or a knockdown scored in all but the extreme cases. We give out 10-8s for dominance without an official ruling rarely. This means that a wide round for Canelo and a close round scored for Golovkin will end up up scored the same only for the other man even though the rounds were not equal in terms of performance. Golovkin did not achieve a 10-8 in round eleven by our traditionally strict standards from any card I saw, official, fan, or media alike. It instead earned a 10-9 in the same way many razor close rounds did for either man.
The implications of this are severe and could perhaps be viewed as a weakness of the system as a whole, but debating the volume of 10-8s is an entirely separate article. What it means for this argument is that a fighter can fairly lose a decision despite having the majority, if not all of the dominant rounds in his favor. If in a potential trilogy fight Golovkin were to have had five wide rounds in his favor and Canelo one, that would have left the other six close. Meaning someone could have reasonably scored the fight for Canelo Alvarez if they had wanted to despite Gennady having done the more dominant work just by giving him the six close rounds.
If someone walks away understanding one thing about boxing scoring from this piece, let it be this: Close rounds should not be intentionally split evenly amongst the two fighters. This is scoring blasphemy. Each round is to be a reset of the fight. Each round is to be scored independently of all other rounds, as if none of them had even happened. A judge cannot factor what happened in round seven into his scoring of round nine. He or she cannot think that the next close round should go to Canelo because the last one was scored for GGG. This is even lazier and much more problematic than mass utilizing 10-10 rounds. The 10 point must system is intentionally designed to treat all rounds equally and we are using it whether we like it or not. Each round exists on its own as a mini three minute fight.
This means close fights in the ring do not necessarily need to be represented by close scorecards. If in a third fight Gennady Golovkin and Canelo Alvarez end up putting on twelve legitimately close rounds that could go either way but GGG’s jab ends up being the difference for a judge in one round, then it is probably going to be the difference in a lot of the rounds. They are going to end up similar. In this case the ASR could actually end up being 120-108 to 120-108 in the opposite direction. Its entirely possible that a fight could happen where there can be no invalid outcome, where a robbery is not possible despite shut outs being given in both directions. This kind of outcome goes against how all other sports’ scoring systems have conditioned us to think, but it is a possibility that remains part of boxing’s reality. In the hypothetical third fight scenario I outlined above, the judge who liked GGG’s jab could turn in something like a 118-110 fairly despite every single round being very close. Rounds are considered in isolation. Never shade a round one way because of anything to do with another round. Doing so is a corruption of the system.
I used 118-110 there intentionally as it was Adelaide Byrd’s infamous card in favor of Canelo Alvarez following GGG-Canelo 1. I am returning to this card to remind that I am not arguing all cards are defensible. That was a ridiculous card. While I will argue day and night that the 114-114 draw card that came back is within the Acceptable Scoring Range of that fight when the volume of close rounds are taken into account, a 118-110 pro Canelo card is without question outside of the ASR and therefore problematic. Why? Gennady Golovkin won more than two rounds wide in that fight. There were stretches in the middle where the Mexican star was barely engaging. Those were wide GGG rounds and there were more than two of them. This means that Canelo can not have possibly scored 118 points and puts Byrd’s card outside of the ASR.
I also want to touch briefly on a few other points. One of which is that commentator scorecards are not gospel. Harold Lederman or Steve Farhood are no more or less likely to score in or out of the ASR than an official judge. I wish Showtime would go back to Press Row Scoring which gave three cards to account for this. In truth, a bad commentator card can almost do more damage than a bad official card because the audience isn’t prepared for it psychologically in the same way. I found this to be the case with the first fight between Rances Barthelemy and Kyril Relikh. I scored it comfortably for Barthelemy but could concede that the ASR for the fight could include a narrow win for Relikh. Farhood scored it for Relikh on TV. When he didn’t get the decision, it became a manufactured outrage despite the extremely fair cards from the official judges. A rematch happened because of the outrage. The second time Relikh was able to amplify what he did so well and dominated. Barthelemy’s career may not ever recover because of a rematch he was artificially forced into by a bad commentator card. Or maybe not so much a bad commentator card, but more a bad reaction to a commentator card by a network and audience not willing to entertain the possibility that the TV scoring is anything but the concrete truth.
Also, and this is returning to scoring each round in a vacuum, throw expectations out the window as much as can be done as a human when scoring a fight. This includes both expectations coming into a fight and expectations created in a fight by performances in previous rounds. Be careful to never score a round for one fighter because he did better than expected. That is irrelevant. Never throw a fighter a pity round or anything similar.
In conclusion, robberies are not common in the sport. While they do happen, it is not enough to score along and then proclaim one simply because the official outcome went the other way. In order to determine if a boxing robbery has taken place, the judging eye must be aware of how many close rounds there were in the fight and account for them potentially having them scored in different directions on other scorecards. In most fights there are only a couple or so of these close rounds, but in less common bouts they may make up the bulk of the fight. Accounting for these rounds creates the Acceptable Scoring Range for the fight. Only with this metric can anyone truly determine if an individual scorecard is problematic. Unless we were to return to the barbarism of having a fight go on until it reaches its own definitive conclusion, boxing matches that reach the end of their scheduled round do not have a clear winner in a good percentage of outcomes.
We need to accept that and stop whining about close decisions going against how we scored the fight. There are inarguably far too many cases where a fan scores a fight 115-113 for one man and then throws an internet fit when the other fighter gets the decision. As if there weren’t close rounds on that close card that could have gone the other way. It is entirely possible to end up with a definitive outcome if one fighter won more than half of the rounds in a wide, undebatable fashion. If no one does that though, it is all up in the air. Consider what the ASR might be for a fight and whether or not scores for the other fighter are possible within it before using the “R” word.
